The invention disclosed herein relates generally to providing monitoring functionality in a communications network. More particularly, the present invention relates to monitoring packet-switched communications, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”) calls, to provide enhanced call detail information which can be used for billing purposes, quality of service (“QoS”) monitoring, network usage tracking, and other similar purposes.
In conventional packet-switched networks, communications between network endpoints are generally facilitated and managed by call mediators and enterprise gatekeepers. Traditionally, a VoIP network endpoint is associated with a call mediator that is responsible for processing calls to and from the VoIP network endpoint. The call mediator in turn, uses H.323 signaling techniques or other protocols to communicate with an enterprise gatekeeper that is responsible for routing calls between call mediators in the enterprise.
While network endpoints and call mediators are generally located at customer sites, the enterprise gatekeeper for these systems generally resides offsite. Thus, a common application service provider scenario is a company managing its own call mediator(s) and network endpoints in a particular office, such as a branch office, and contracting with an entirely different company to provide packet-switched network services and to manage the enterprise gatekeeper(s) associated with the packet-switched network. In some cases, however, companies maintain their own networks entirely having local endpoints, gatekeepers, and other system components that are part of their overall VoIP network.
When a communication occurs between two network endpoints, the call mediators associated with the endpoints are typically responsible for recording and storing details associated with the communication including, but not limited to the identity of the endpoints associated with a call, the start and stop times of a call, QoS metrics associated with a call, a cause code indicating why the communication terminated, and other similar information.
In commercial applications, these communication details are later used to generate customer bills based on network usage and other business factors. When a system generates a customer bill, a billing server or other similar transaction processing module queries the various call mediators throughout the network to provide the communication details associated with the customer that the call mediators have stored. Sometimes, call mediators also push this data to the billing server or other similar transaction processing module. The communication details are then aggregated and used to create the bill.
One problem associated with this method for service providers is that the billing system relies on data that is controlled by and stored at a customer. Thus, there some risk of fraud associated with relying on unverified data. Further, retrieving communication details from many different call mediators is resource intensive and inefficient. In addition, in some cases, call mediators store some communication details in formats that are not suited for processing by a given billing system. Finally, cases arise where communications are routed beyond call mediators, such as via the PSTN to endpoints located beyond a customer's site or network, and thus call mediators are not well-suited to capturing communication details associated with circuit-switched networks.
There is thus a need for systems and methods that provide more reliable communication details to billing systems in packet-switched networks. There is also a need to make this information efficiently accessible and stored in formats suitable for processing by billing systems.